Urge to Merge

 

Book Review

Title: Heartfelt Symphonies

Author: Chinmayee Gayatree Sahu

Format: PDF E-book

All genuine art is a longing to transcend the self. Chinmayee Gayatree Sahu’s poems articulate that longing eloquently and evocatively. Heartfelt Symphonies is a collection of 40 poems divided into three groups entitled Nature, Fire and Life. The first two poems act as a kind of invocation of the divine. Interestingly, the very first poem, ‘Devi’, is an assertion of the divinity of the feminine as much as it is an invocation of goddess Durga. “Look around and you shall see HER (goddess) in each feminine body,” the poet asserts vehemently. It is also interesting to note that the second poem is an invocation of Shiva, the potent male counterpart of Durga. We meet Shiva’s various avatars here: Adiyogi, Ardhanariswara, the Tandav dancer, and Neelkantha.

The tremendous energy possessed by these two deities suffuses the remaining poems all of which are thoroughly secular and worldly. A ubiquitous form of energy in the entire collection is an urge to merge into a higher being which is what transcendence means. “YOU are the ocean where I want to merge, / to dance like the waves is my strongest urge,” the poet says in ‘Dancing Waves’. The poet longs to be a wave in the ocean, a part of the infinity, while at the same time there is ample evidence that the YOU (the upper case belongs to the poet) is also a human lover whose glance sets the poet persona on a high tide.

This dual longing for merging into the infinity as well as with a human lover is the essence of Chinmayee’s poems. Human love has its inevitable limitations and imperfections and the poet is acutely aware of it. Many of the poems are about broken love, “cracks in the heart” [‘Rain Drops’], and longing for a healing hug [‘Winter is Here’]. But there is no place for frustration or capitulation here. The poet bounces back after each setback. The woods may be dark but there are always “rays of hope” penetrating the “thickest canopy”.

If the Nature poems employ metaphors and images from nature, the Fire poems rely on the evocative power of light. This section brings us the light of kindness, the cheerfulness of carpe diem [‘Cheers to the Bonfire’], and acceptance of imbalances and imperfections. There is a steely determination

To withstand the pain,

To tolerate the suffering,

To rise from the puddle of rejection,

To fight every voice that tries to judge,

To resolve to get up after every fall,

To look into the eyes of the fear,

To enable me to keep my head high above my shoulder

[‘The Fire Within’]

In the last section titled ‘Life’, we come across some of the finest poems of the collection. Presenting a woman who sold her soul to the commerce of contemporary obsession with the female body, the poet shows how such an obsession will lead one to sure self-destruction. “How dumb she was, busy to impress and not express / how foolish she was to give in to the fad and undress!” [‘Beauty for notifications’]

Chinmayee’s poetry is extracted from raw experiences of life. The lines carry both light and darkness, love and rejection, hope and despair. But the good side always wins in the end. Even when everything “seems like falling apart”, there is light at the end of the tunnel if only you keep moving. [‘Look within, Look around’].

What really strikes one about Chinmayee’s poetry may be the veneer of mysticism that glosses the dominant urge in it to merge into a larger reality in spite of the possible rejections by that reality. After all, much of life lies in that grey area “between the shadow and the soul” (Pablo Neruda’s phrase) and Chinmayee succeeds in identifying the meaningful patterns which punctuate that area.

The collection can be downloaded here.

PS. The above book is part of The Blogchatter’s Ebook Carnival. My own contribution to it is – LIFE: 24 Essays.